There’s no doubting the success of Twitter, but there may be a new player taking center stage in the social media world. A start-up company called Bubble Motion, based in Singapore, has launched a voice microblogging service called Bubbly.
Much like Twitter, Bubbly allows users to send short messages, but instead of being restricted to a 140 character text, users can send short voice messages as well as texts. So far the company has 12 million clients in Asia, accumulated in 18 months, and they’re looking to go global.
Unlike Twitter, Bubbly is a service that costs money, owing their customer appeal to celebrities using the service to communicate with their fans. It may not be as successful as a pay service in North America, but if it doesn’t, the concept could easily evolve into a system that allows companies to send messages, like new service announcements, to their own customers.
With apps for Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android smartphone set to be released later this year, and future offerings of photo and video messages on their way, Bubbly may very well be the next social media fad that becomes a household name.
The most interesting part of the idea is that Bubble Motion is able to distribute sound files at such a large volume. Voice files, which are much larger than their text counterparts, can consume high amounts of bandwidth and hard drive space, but both of those areas are constantly being improved. It’s just a matter of time until voice files are as cost effective to send as texts, and when that happens, we’ll all be wondering how we used to get along typing our messages on a keyboard, even if that keyboard was on a touch screen mobile device.
Tags: bubbly, social media, social networking, text message, twitter, voice message